Your coffee maker may be less repairable than your phone, which is really saying something. In a new report, U.S. PIRG Education Fund looked at 58 blenders, coffeemakers, and vacuums, and nearly two-thirds earned an F for repair material availability. Only three products in the whole group offered a repair or service manual, and most didn’t offer meaningful spare parts or any first-party repair path at all.
A Bad Report Card, Three Years Running
Since the New York Right to Repair law went into effect in 2023, PIRG has been reporting on how well manufacturers are complying with the laws they’re bound by. Spoiler alert: Not well.
The first Leaders and Laggards report found that although smartphones and laptops were beginning to comply, VR headsets and digital cameras had miserably bad repair support. The next report found that no dishwasher scored above a C.
This year, PIRG focused on stuff around the house. Leaders and Laggards III found that even pricey appliances often come with little to no real repair support. Some manufacturers sell products for hundreds of dollars while withholding manuals, limiting parts access, or offering no repair option beyond warranty replacement.
Laws in California, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, and Connecticut require these manufacturers to give owners and independent repair shops the same access their own technicians have to repair materials. Almost universally, these small appliances are missing the mark.
Disposable by Design
That lines up depressingly well with what we’ve seen ourselves. Earlier this year, we tore down three blenders: a bargain-bin Mainstays model, an entry-level SharkNinja, and the Open Funk re:Mix, an open-source blender actually designed to be fixed. Mainstays and SharkNinja were both big repair disappointments, designed to be disposable.
PIRG’s report shows the disposable mindset is still winning. More than 67% of the products assessed did not offer internal replacement parts, and 62% offered no first-party repair option at all. In some cases, support reps all but admitted the product was meant for the dump, telling PIRG that broken units should be discarded or that a model was made “with the intention of never being repaired.”
KitchenAid said, “We do not recommend self-repair” and told the PIRG representative that attempting a repair would void the blender’s warranty, even though that’s illegal in the US.
Braun said, “There are no repair options available.”
Nutribullet said, “There is no repair,” and told PIRG that their only recommendation for a broken blender was to cut the cable and throw it away. God forbid somebody else try to repair it on its way to the dump.
Products don’t end up this disposable by accident. And it matters because these are exactly the kinds of products people use hard and replace often. Blenders have couplers, bearings, switches, and jars that crack. Vacuums eat belts, batteries, hoses, and brush rolls. Coffee makers have pumps, seals, heating elements, and carafes that do not last forever. These are normal wear-and-tear machines. Treating them as sealed, disposable black boxes is absurd.
We do sell blender parts, btw.
For blenders that you can actually take apart.
Repair Is Possible, When Companies Bother
The good news is that the report also makes clear this isn’t inevitable. A few products scored all right. The Gaggia Classic Pro E24 espresso machine actually posted a manual, which shouldn’t be a high bar but, hey, it’s a surprising bright spot in this otherwise pretty sad report. Our Open Funk teardown made the same point from a different angle: when a company decides repair matters, it can build that into the product from the start. Manuals can exist. Parts can be sold. Assemblies can come apart without a fight. None of this requires magic. It just requires giving a damn.
If Right to Repair is going to mean anything, it has to apply to the blender that dies making smoothies just as much as the phone in your pocket. PIRG’s report is a useful reminder that the repair fight is about more than just high-tech products. Sometimes it is about the coffee maker on the fritz, ruining your Tuesday morning, and whether the manufacturer thinks your only option should be the trash can.
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